stand within the area they defined was to be absorbed within
an immersive visual experience formed by tactile, restless
imagery. Each painting took the form of a cellular grid-like
arrangement. Within that template, and working directly on
the canvas, the artist improvised a bombardment of rapidly
formed marks and shapes which occasionally coalesced into
strange and sometimes familiar-looking images. In Threshold
for example, a ladder and, elsewhere, a pair of towers can
be discerned, both being motifs that would make frequent
appearances in later works. The surface of each painting
seems animated, giving rise to an impression of instability
and endless, flickering energy. Collectively, the installation
was deliberately calculated to provoke claustrophobia, the
welter of images appearing overwhelming.
A possible source of these developments was a personal
experience, in itself unremarkable. The artist has related
how, while travelling on a train through Holland one night,
he observed the illuminated interiors of certain buildings, as
if framed by their large windows. The succession of glimpses
afforded on that occasion appears to have made an impression.
Sensed obliquely and fleetingly, such cryptic images seemed
replete with enigmatic significance. In particular, they
signalled the rich, suggestive potential of unfamiliar visual
situations grasped momentarily and incompletely. In another
way, the paintings may also be seen as a response to an all
too human predicament: the difficulty of choosing. In an
image-saturated contemporary world how can any single
motif be definitive? From a vast range of possible images,
why prefer one to another? The ‘smallness’ that ‘stirs’ in the
title of one of the paintings shown in the Curwen exhibition
refers not only to the scale of the multiple, individual forms
that, collectively, comprise each large canvas. The sense of
diminution also suggests an ego – but one tempered by the
acceptance of doubt.
From the early 1990s, the grid-like format of the works
exhibited at Curwen Gallery gave way to a ziggurat-like
motif. This is the defining characteristic of the Witness series
of paintings that he commenced in 1990. Echoing the earlier
cellular arrangement, the first of these works, Present Bound
1990, invested an abstract structure with qualities that seem

more personal, almost anthropomorphic. Subtracting cellshapes from the all-over treatment of the surface, Beattie
produced an image that, by virtue of its isolated situation,
suggests a figure. This tesselated form recurs throughout the
series. In each painting its position, disposition and situation
are different, like a protagonist in a range of scenes and
guises.
In Present Bound the stark contrast between the sensuous,
painted area and the raw canvas suggests an exposed, almost
naked, presence. Subsequently, the same motif invited a range
of physiognomic interpretations: respectively appearing
upright, totemic, slouched, weary, vulnerable and anxious.
With these successive manifestations, there is the sense of
the artist inhabiting and exploring a range of different bodily
states, each expressively distinct. The way that Beattie invests
each abstract image with values that seem both human and
vulnerable is the product of a compelling artistic sensibility.
Assertive yet questioning, Beattie’s art evokes caution and
uncertainty in a contemporary world that has grown wary of
intellectual, moral and artistic authority. Supplanting those
certainties, it asks: ‘What am I?’
At the heart of Beattie’s work there is an ever-present sense
of going within, entering unfamiliar spaces and encountering
ambiguous presences. The process of creating his paintings
seems to involve a constant negotiation between the will to
understand and the recognition that nothing can be known
absolutely. In the imaginative spaces he creates, there is a sense
of displacement. An ambiguous hinterland is articulated by
disconnected forms. From these amorphous shapes, different
elements begin to acquire recognisable characteristics. Some
parts are reminiscent of doorways and windows. Elsewhere,
there are ladders, towers and, later, arches, steps, barrelvaulted tunnels, horizons and perspective lines leading to
a distant horizon. All come and go, interact, fall away. The
world thus created is revealed as a strange and precarious
place, dimly illuminated, elusive, leading nowhere.
At the same time it is clear that none of this is the recognisable
world that we know, or think we know. No decipherable
narrative is offered. The fragmented perspectives are a
jumble. The steps are poised in space. Rather, the quiet
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